Sermons from the Latins/Sermon 41
Ninth Sunday After Pentecost.
Christ on Mount Olivet.
"When Jesus drew near Jerusalem, seeing the city, He wept over it." — Luke xix. 41.
SYNOPSIS.
Ex.: I. Power of Scripture. II. Arguments for Christ's divinity.
I. Wept over city : 1. Divine sympathy. 2. Unselfishness. 3. Popular response.
II. Foretold ruin : 1. Prophecy. 2. Author and subject. 3. Destruction of Jerusalem.
III. Cleared Temple: 1. Sacrifice. 2. Traders. 3. St. Jerome.
IV. Lord of all : 1. Supper-room. 2. Ass and foal. 3. True force of argument.
Per.: 1. Power of Scripture. 2. Choice of means. 3. Omnipotence.
SERMON.
Brethren, if you care this afternoon to take your family Bible — and you should regard it as a sacred weekly duty so to do — if, I say, you care, after church, to take your family Bible and read over and ponder over the Gospel I have just read — Luke xix. 41-47 — you will find there three excellent arguments against the anti-Christian spirit of our times — three convincing proofs of Christ's divinity.
And first, we read that He wept over Jerusalem. Lamentation over our own misfortunes is a purely human passion, but to forget self and weep over the ruin of another is divine. Now, here was Christ on the day of His victory — the one day of His whole earthly career worthy, humanly speaking, to be called triumphant. Fresh in the popular memory was the resuscitation of Lazarus, the healing of the paralytic, the sight restored to the man born blind — and but yesterday occurred the wonder of the Transfiguration— miracles so stupendous that they silenced even His enemies, and encouraged His well-wishers to come forth to meet Him crying " Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord." And yet, of all that throng on Olivet's slope, He alone is sad. His eyes turn from the acclaiming multitude to the city beneath Him and He bursts into tears. Is it the thought of His past wrongs compared to His present triumphs that has touched His heart? No, He was ever cheerful and patient under suffering and wrong. Is it the prevision of the tortures He is soon to endure at the hands of this very people? No, self has no place in His thoughts. Standing there, a figure of sublime, superhuman disinterestedness, such as the world has never since or before seen, He weeps over the city of His enemies, their short-sightedness and approaching destruction. After even His greatest miracles, Peter alone confessed Him to be the Son of the living God. The prodigies attending His death on the cross moved Longinus alone to declare " Verily this was the Son of God," and even at His Resurrection the words " My Lord and my God 99 were uttered by Thomas and Magdalen only. Yet here, merely at seeing Him weep over the city — an action so simple and yet so sublime, so forgetful of self and so full of compassion and forgiveness for others, so intensely human and yet so immeasurably above the human — so divine — that vast throng cried out its profession of faith till the hills and valleys rang again with " Hosannas to the Son of David! " and " Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord."
Secondly, we read the words of Christ addressed to the city — words scarcely intelligible, so broken are they by His sobs and tears. " Didst thou," He says, " but know this joyful day that I am the guardian of thy peace, thou wouldst not seek to murder Me. Didst thou but know what things are in store for thee in punishment for that crime, thou too wouldst weep. But now all this is hidden from thine eyes," and then He goes on to foretell the city's impending calamities. Here is our second argument for Christ's divinity. Experience teaches us, and Holy Writ further assures us, that the events of the future are known to no man — no, not even to the angels in heaven — but to God alone. " Show the things that are to come hereafter," says Isaias (xli. 23), " and we shall know that ye are gods." True, the prophets of the Old Law foretold the events of the New, but, as St. Peter says, it was not they who spoke, but the Spirit of God who spoke in them and through them. Between their prophecies and those of Christ, there is this difference, that theirs pointed ever not to themselves but to Christ. What the Old Testament says in prophecy, the New repeats as already accomplished. The two are well typified in the two seraphic spirits described by Isaias as flying through the heavens crying, one to the other, "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth," or again in the two cherubim, over the ark of the Covenant, whose wings met midway and who gazed ever one upon the other. But Christ's prophecies all concern Himself, He is the beginning and the end — the A and the Z — the central figure of all prophecy. Therefore I say, Christ, being a true Prophet, must have had in Him the Spirit of God; and being the subject of His own prophecy He must have been God Himself. Now a true prophecy is one that is justified by the event, and that Christ was a true Prophet was never more clearly proven than in the things He foretold regarding the city of Jerusalem. "Thine enemies shall come upon thee," He says, " and they shall cast a trench about thee and compass thee round, and straighten thee on every side and beat thee flat to the ground and thy children who are in thee; and they shall not leave in thee a stone upon a stone, because thou hast not known the time of thy visitation." Forty years after Christ's crucifixion that prophecy was fulfilled to the letter, as we learn from the non-Christian historians, Josephus and Egisippus. They tell us that thirty-six years after Christ's death there began a series of prodigies in the city, such as men had never seen before. Ghostly armies were seen to do battle in the air over the city; a blinding light frequently in an instant turned the darkest night into the brightest day; earthquakes shook the walls and flung open the gates of the city; and for four years, night and day, a man, a stranger to all, roamed the city streets crying: " Woe, woe to Jerusalem." Finally, in the fortieth year after Christ, when three million Jews were collected in Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover, the Roman army suddenly appeared and laid siege to the city. In their march on Jerusalem they had slain no less than fourteen hundred thousand Jews. But the worst was to come, for now began a war compared to which that of China and Japan was nothing, and the American Revolution as the killing of one man. For the Jews inside the city were divided among themselves, and fought till, from very hunger and disease, they could fight no longer. On the other hand, the deserters and fugitives were all captured and cut open by the enemy, in the hope their captors had of securing the gold the poor wretches had attempted to save by swallowing. War and famine — famine such that the nearest and dearest slew one another for a meal, and mothers secretly cooked and ate their own infants. Dead bodies everywhere, and the living died while trying to bury the dead, until the city became one vast pestilential morgue. And at last, when resistance was no longer possible, the victorious Romans rushed in with fire and sword, and burned and razed the Temple to the ground, and levelled the city walls to the very foundation. Josephus estimates that, at the siege of Jerusalem alone, ninety-seven thousand were taken prisoner, eleven hundred thousand were slain, two thousand were killed by their own people, and two thousand more died by their own hand. Such was the fulfilment of Christ's prophecy, and even had we no historic testimony of this fact, there is still in the city of Rome an imperishable proof — the triumphal arch of Titus, the victorious Roman general, bearing on its sculptured sides the story of the siege and overthrow of Jerusalem — the best preserved of all the arches, as though divine Providence would have it stand as a proof to all ages of God's ultimate victory over His enemies, of the exact fulfilment of a true prophecy, and of the divinity of Jesus Christ.
Our third and last proof of Christ's divinity is contained in the words: "And entering into the Temple He cast out them that sold therein and them that bought." All Judea came annually to Jerusalem to offer sacrifice in the Temple, and as those coming from afar found it more convenient to purchase their offerings in Jerusalem, the dealers, in the heat of competition, had set up their booths in the very porch of the Temple, so that the " house of prayer had become a den of thieves." Now the force of the argument cannot be better presented than in the words of St. Jerome himself. " Some," he says, " affirm that the greatest proof of Our Lord's divinity was the resuscitation of Lazarus; others, the cure of the man born blind; others, the Transfiguration; but to me, of all His miracles none seems more wonderful than this : that one man, a lowly unfortunate, on His way to the gallows, could have so prevailed over the hatred and cupidity of the Scribes and Pharisees as to overthrow their tables and booths, scourge them from the Temple and effect, in a few moments, what all the power of the Roman legions, after seven years' trial, failed to accomplish. A celestial fire must have radiated from His eyes, and the majesty of the divinity shone in His countenance."
Brethren, it is characteristic of the Gospel history of Our Lord's life that seemingly trivial incidents such as the foregoing are found on closer inspection to be replete with deep dogmatic truth. This is further illustrated by two other circumstances closely allied to the subject of to-day's Gospel. A few days later Our Lord, wishing to celebrate the Passover and institute the Blessed Eucharist, sent Peter and John ahead, saying: " Go ye into the city and when you shall see a man carrying a pitcher of water say to him: The Master saith, Where is my refectory where I may eat the pasch with My disciples? And he shall show you a large dining-room, and there prepare." That the event transpired just as He foretold goes to show that the forecast was the exercise of no mere human knowledge but a calling into play of the divine gift of prophecy, and the promptness with which the man acceded to so extraordinary a request is proof positive that the petitioner was the Lord and Master of all, whose will no man can resist. Again, on the morning of the very day of His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, when they drew nigh to the city, Jesus sent two disciples ahead into Bethphage, saying: " Go ye into the village that is over against you, and immediately you shall find an ass tied and a colt with her; loose them and bring them to Me. And if any man shall say anything to you, say ye that the Lord hath need of them, and forthwith he will let them go." The prophet Zacharias had foretold the coming of the future King, the Messias, in these words : " Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold thy King cometh to thee, meek and sitting upon an ass and a colt, the foal of her that is used to the yoke." These words were well known, and very dear to the hearts of all who looked for the redemption of Israel, and their exact fulfilment in the entry of Christ and His followers into Jerusalem accounts in no small measure for the remarkable outburst of popular enthusiasm with which He was greeted. Here then we have as proofs of His divinity, first, His wonderful insight into the future, amounting to omniscience; second, His entire conformity to the Messianic prophecies, even in the minutest details; and third, His practical assertion of absolute dominion over all things. An unbeliever would probably attempt to explain away the force of the argument by asserting that the ready acquiescence of the man in placing his guest-chamber at the disposal of the Saviour was but the exercise of ordinary hospitality, but nowhere in history do we find that the law of kindness to strangers was wont to be carried to such extremes. Neither is the Socialist's explanation to be admitted, viz., that each incident is but an assertion on the part of Our Lord that each of us has a right in the time of need to help himself to the belongings of his more fortunate neighbor. Christ came not to destroy but to fulfil the law, and the seventh point of the law is, "Thou shalt not steal." He said, indeed, "The Master hath need of them," but there was no such crying necessity in the case as justifies the forcible appropriation of another's provisions, lands, or cattle in times of war or famine, or in the face of a mighty conflagration. Besides, in neither case did the owners yield to force, but each evidently assented quite cheerfully, proving that Christ's almighty power influenced them to cede to the Lord that which He had but lent them for a time, and which anytime and everywhere He could justly claim as His own.
Brethren, from these considerations I would have you gather three points: First, the power of Holy Scripture as a defender of truth and a weapon against error. The most appalling danger to religion in modern times is the popular loss of faith in Christ's divinity. The ideas of the non-Catholic world on this most important point are growing daily more vague and uncertain. Let us not neglect the study of those sacred pages, in almost every line of which we will find reasons for the faith that is in us. Second, Let us admire the sublime condescension with which Christ chooses at times the lowliest of His creatures to be the vehicle of His truth or the instrument of His will. The royal entry of earthly kings is made in gorgeous chariots drawn by prancing steeds, but Christ's kingdom is not from hence. The humble ass and colt, recalling as they do the prophecy of Zachary, add more lustre to His retinue than all such pomp and ceremony. Such disregard of earthly aids is in line with His choice of fishermen to be His Apostles, and perhaps the person and the mission of each of us, however humble, are as precious before God as those of the great ones of the earth. Finally, let us adore the Lord's transcendent power whereby He is able, without infringing on our liberty, to use us as He will. Let us throw open to Him the citadels of our souls, and invite Him to take undivided possession, crying: " Hosanna to the Son. of David," and, " Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord."